


Waking Up in Vegas

by ashesinyourhair



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe, Everyone Is Alive, F/F, F/M, Las Vegas Wedding, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-02-20 16:35:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2435552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesinyourhair/pseuds/ashesinyourhair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean/Cas accidental Vegas marriage fluff-angst (mostly fluff), with eventual appearances by Sam, Charlie, Jo, and Ash. Also possibly acrobats, magicians, and aliens. (Maybe not aliens. Definitely most of the other things, though.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Did We Get Hitched Last Night?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coming to after a night of drunken Vegas revelry to find yourself in bed with a stranger in a hotel room you don't recognize? Eh, sort of a problem, but the kind of problem Dean can deal with. Right up until he realizes the stranger is actually his best friend, and the drunken hookup was, apparently, more of a drunken wedding.

The hellish peals of a default alarm tone rip him out of blessed unconsciousness. He groans and folds the pillow over his face—a mistake, as it’s soaked with drool and smells like cheap booze and something sickly sweet he’s in no state to try and identify. He rolls over, squinting against the light.

There’s someone else in the bed, hogging the covers and wrapped up like a burrito all the way at the far side of the impressively huge mattress. Dean has no idea who this could be. The list is far too long, even just to the point where his memories of the previous night fade into alcoholic oblivion. The phone alarm continues to ring, and Dean gives the blanket burrito a nudge and says, “I think that’s you, sweetheart.”

 _“Unnngh,”_ comes a surprisingly deep voice from within the covers, and Dean jerks his hand back. A prickly heat crawls over his skin. Okay, a guy. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. He just wasn’t expecting it, is all. It’s cool.

There’s no further reaction from the other side of the mattress, and the alarm isn’t giving up, so Dean turns back over and clambers out of the bed to dig the phone out of the mess of clothes on the floor. He kicks his jeans and t-shirt out of the way and bends to pick up a pair of black dress slacks. A matching blazer hangs haphazardly from the back of a chair, along with a blue tie. Dean doesn’t really know suits, so he has no idea whether this one suggests “Fortune 500 CEO” any more than “shady real estate salesman”, but he hopes against all precedent that drunk!Dean picked up someone classy this time. He fishes the phone out of the pocket of the slacks.

The pile of blankets stirs, rolls over, and Dean catches a flash of unkempt dark hair out of the corner of his eye, but mostly he’s staring at the phone. It’s in a ridiculous yellow honeycomb-patterned plastic case with bees on it, and when he taps the screen to silence the alarm, a lock screen full of text messages appears. He recognizes all the names.

“Dean?”

He forces himself to look up. Cas blinks blearily at him from the bed. “Why are you naked?”

Dean stares at him, then looks down at himself, then at the phone ( _Sam: Hey, where are you guys? Charlie’s not answering any of…)_ , and finally back at Cas, who’s running his fingers through his mussed-up hair and only making it worse.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

“We don’t know that anything happened.”

Cas sits on his side of the bed, placidly sipping coffee he ordered from room service while Dean frantically dressed and fumbled with his phone, which refused to come on and was sticky for reasons he preferred to leave unknown for the moment.

“I think we’ve got a pretty good idea,” Dean says, and flings his gross phone at his gross pillow in defeat. “Would you put some clothes on?”

Cas regards the wrinkled suit with mistrust. “Those aren’t mine.”

“They’d better be,” Dean says.

Cas sets his coffee aside and stands, wrapping a sheet around his hips. He picks the blazer off the back of the chair and inspects the tag. “This isn’t my size,” he says, and holds it out to Dean.

Dean rolls his eyes and takes the jacket, but on checking the label he realizes Cas is right—it isn’t his size. It’s Dean’s.

“This one must be mine,” Cas says, retrieving a second crumpled jacket from under the bed. He lays it out on top of the covers and attempts to smooth out the wrinkles.

“Forget about that,” Dean says. “Just get dressed and let’s get the hell out of here. Sam’s probably got the whole Vegas P.D. looking for us.”

“Police departments don’t search for missing persons until they’ve been gone at least twenty-four hours,” Cas says.

Dean starts to say he’s pretty sure that’s a TV myth, but before he can get the words out he stops and stares down at his hand. The ring he always wears on his right hand, that he fiddles with when he’s anxious, is gone. There’s a different ring on the other hand. He pulls it off and peers at it closely, though he doesn’t need to. He knows whose it is.

“Cas,” he croaks. Cas is buttoning his cuffs, unnecessarily and totally oblivious, but Dean can see the glint of the silver on his left hand. He clears his throat and says again, louder, “Cas!”

Cas finishes up his buttons and looks up, and his eyes drop from Dean’s to the ring he’s holding gingerly away from himself like it might bite. Finally, _finally_ an expression akin to the panic Dean’s feeling breaks across his face.

“Oh,” Cas says, and looks down at his own hand. “ _Oh._ ”

Dean feels his legs go weak and sinks down onto the bed, still holding the ring out because he can’t just drop it but he sure as hell isn’t putting it back on, and Cas is frozen in place and making no move to do anything about it either.

Married. They got fucking _married._

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

“We’ll get it annulled,” Dean says in the elevator down, the longest and most awkward ride in the smallest elevator he’s ever been in ever in his whole life. “Like Britney. Drunk Vegas weddings you don’t remember aren’t legally—” He stops, a ray of hope breaking through the clouds of horribleness hanging over him. “Wait, this isn’t even legal, is it?” he asks, turning to look at Cas for the first time since they left the hotel room. “We can’t be married. This is Nevada.”

Cas is tucked into the far back corner of the elevator, leaning against the wall in his wrinkled suit. He frowns. “Actually,” he says, and taps-swipes at his phone, then hands it to Dean. There’s an article on the screen, but Dean doesn’t even have to read it to guess from the picture, a rainbow flag waving in front of a state seal that looks maybe vaguely familiar from the highway signs, what it says. “They just started issuing licenses this week.”

“Great,” Dean groans.

“Yes, it is,” Cas says, and takes his phone back and slips it into his pocket. “It’s about time.”

“Yeah, just in time for us to get shitty Vegas married like a million drunk straight people. Score one for equality.”

“I don’t find you very funny,” Cas says.

“What else is new,” Dean says, and they don’t talk for the rest of the elevator ride.

They have to settle up their bill before they leave, Dean having lost the argument over doing a runner when Cas pointed out the hotel already had his credit card number. “Three nineteen forty-three,” the desk clerk says, and Dean’s “Are you kidding me?” gets him a glare from Cas and he sighs and hands over his credit card. Which gives him an idea.

“Give me your phone,” Dean says on the way out to the parking lot, where he hopes the Impala will be sitting and this isn’t a _Dude, Where’s My Car?_ thing on top of _The Hangover._

“Why?”

“Mine’s busted and I need to get into my credit card account.”

“Why?” Cas repeats.

“Dammit, Cas, _because,_ ” he says. “Look, you don’t remember last night any better than I do, right?”

“I remember doing shots,” Cas says. “I think I remember you singing karaoke.”

“Yeah, well, goes to show how out of it you were,” Dean says, because he does remember karaoke and hopes like hell Cas believes he dreamed it or something. “The point is, if I used my card to rent that hotel room, who knows what else I used it for? But if the charges are on my account, that should give us some idea of what the hell all might have happened.”

“Why does it matter what happened?” Cas asks. “It happened. Shouldn’t we focus on what to do next?”

“Oh, it matters,” Dean says firmly. He’s saved from having to explain why, though, because he spots the Impala at the far end of the parking lot, taking up most of four spaces in a diagonal fashion. He lets out a whoop of triumph and breaks into a sprint.

“Damn, it’s good to see you, Baby,” he says as he unlocks the door, and he turns around to ask Cas for his phone again, but Cas isn’t there. He’s still halfway across the lot, making his leisurely way to the car as though they don’t have anything pressing to do. Dean starts to yell at him to hurry up, but stops himself. Cas is staring out into the distance, squinting against the sun, the hot desert wind whipping at his hair and his tie and at the blazer he’s wearing for some reason instead of just carrying the thing. He’s carrying Dean’s, instead, after Dean tried to leave it in the room—“It could be a rental,” Cas said, like being out the cost of a probably cheap-ass suit jacket was the worst potential problem they faced.

He doesn’t know why, but he suddenly feels like shit. He turns away, leans down into the car and starts it, cranking the air conditioner all the way up, though he knows the car will still focus most of its cooling efforts on making sure the engine doesn’t overheat. He busies himself fiddling with the radio dial until Cas appears at the passenger door and slides in.

“No one is answering,” Cas says, and hands his phone over to Dean.

“Probably still passed out,” Dean says. “Like we would be if it wasn’t for your godawful ringtone.”

“It’s an alarm,” Cas says. “Its purpose is to wake you up.”

“What’s the point of having this fancy phone if you’re not gonna make it wake you up to AC/DC?” Dean asks as he swipes through the screens looking for something that might be a web browser. Cas waits patiently, or seems to, though he watches all of Dean’s fumbling actions as though he’d very much like to snatch the phone back and do it himself. Finally Dean manages to pull up his credit card company’s website and access his transaction history. “Bingo,” he says.

“What?”

Dean turns the phone toward Cas. “Wedding chapel,” he says. “Last charge showing up so far.”

“‘Whole Lotta Love Wedding Chapel,’” Cas reads. “I’m fairly certain that’s copyright infringement.”

“Good a place to start as any,” Dean says. “We’ll backtrack from there. Leave that open and keep trying to call the others. Let’s go find out what our wedding was like.”

Cas frowns, but minimizes the browser and is scrolling through his contacts when the phone rings. It sounds like a regular telephone ring, and Dean shakes his head as Cas answers. “Hello?”

“Put it on speaker,” Dean says as he backs out of the parking space. Spaces.

Cas does so, and a twangy, disoriented-sounding voice fills the car. “Hello? Can y’hear me?”

“Ash?” Dean asks. He glances at the number on the screen; it doesn’t look familiar, and there’s no name.

“Dean?” Ash replies. “Whaddya want?”

“You called us, Ash,” Dean says, rolling his eyes at Cas. “What’s going on? Where are you?”

“Uh, yeah…” Ash says. “I’m kinda… in jail?” He says it like a question, like he could possibly not know for sure whether he was in jail. But then, Ash.

“Which jail?” Cas asks.

“Well… the walls are this kinda puke green color, and there’s this big round shield on the wall with mountains and shit…”

“Maybe you should give the phone to someone else,” Cas suggests.

“A cop,” Dean says, and pulls to the side of the road. “Specify ‘a cop’.”

“Let us talk to one of the policemen, Ash,” Cas says, and there’s a confused sort of mumbling and shuffling in the background. Cas turns the phone off speaker and puts it to his ear, and has a brief formal conversation with someone on the other end. He thanks the person and hangs up, and brings up the phone’s GPS. “Head north,” he tells Dean.

Dean sighs and pulls out onto the highway. It’s only as he’s turning the wheel and the sunlight cuts through the windows at just the right angle to glint off something on his left hand that he realizes, at some point, without thinking about it, he’d put Cas’s ring back on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanna reblog this fic on tumblr? [Here's the post.](http://ashesinyourhair.tumblr.com/post/143299174244/waking-up-in-vegas-part-5) Includes a teaser for the first chapter and a link to the latest update. Thanks for spreading the word!


	2. You Gotta Help Me Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean and Cas bail Ash out of jail after he has a close encounter with a military base, which Dean regrets almost instantly when Ash starts asking overly observant questions about them instead. While the mystery of government conspiracies regarding alien contact remains unsolved, the one regarding Dean and Cas's activities of the previous night yields a startling new clue.

“Aliens,” Dean repeats.

They’re waiting at the police station for the return of Ash’s belongings—his wallet and a flashlight, plus a backpack containing his laptop, two battered paperbacks titled _The Real Area 51: An Insider’s Account_ and _Saucerful of Secrets: What They Really Found at Roswell_ , and a pound of habanero beef jerky. Cas has managed to keep himself out of this conversation by feigning deep interest in a pamphlet about work-release programs. Dean’s pretty sure he’s not imagining the hint of a smirk on his face.

“Dude, why do you think I’m here?” Ash whispers, probably louder than he thinks. “I’m telling you, I got too close. There’s something there they don’t want nobody to see.”

“It’s a military base, Ash. Pretty sure there’s a lot of stuff they don’t want you to see.” At least he’d escaped with a minor trespassing charge and non-exorbitant bail, which he was still damn sure going to pay back. _You’re lucky they just think you’re a dumb, drunk redneck,_ Dean thinks bitterly, because for better or worse, that’s all anybody sees when they look at Ash. Probably they should still get out of here before somebody realizes he was an MIT almost-graduate and develops open-source security software and cryptocurrency in his spare time and is very likely a _Good Will Hunting_ -level genius. Dean would never admit it out loud, but the fact that Ash believes in aliens and government conspiracies makes him wonder if there isn’t something to it after all.

Mercifully, someone returns with Ash’s stuff before he’s able to get too far into his explanation of whatever he was doing out there, none of which Dean particularly wants to know in case he ever has to testify about it. Once he’s satisfied nothing is missing, with the possible exception of some of the beef jerky which Dean hastily talks him out of making a scene over, they head out to the car.

Ash spends the trip back into downtown rambling about antimatter, or antigravity, or both—Dean’s kind of got other things on his mind at the moment, like where the hell everyone else is and how much it’d set him back to bail out all of them, and the many and varied tortures Ellen Harvelle would visit upon him if she knew he lost Jo in Vegas, and the fact that Cas is staring out the passenger window and not saying anything.

Ash reaches a stopping point in his diatribe, heaves an exasperated sigh, and tears into a strip of jerky. The smell of it wafts toward Dean, to the dismay of his stomach. He cracks a window. Cas doesn’t react at all.

“So, what the hell’s going on with y’all two?” Ash asks.

“Nothing,” Dean says, maybe a little too quick.

“Uh-huh.” Ash leans forward and peers between them. His gaze settles on Cas. “What’s with the suit?”

“It’s a long story,” Cas says, without turning from the window.

“So gimme the recap version,” Ash says. When Cas doesn’t respond, he prods Dean in the shoulder and says, “Well, come on. What’d y’all do, get drunk married or something?”

The silence that fills the car is as heavy and pervasive as the stench of jerky from Ash’s backpack.

“Well, goddamn,” Ash says. “I owe Jo fifty bucks.”

“You owe me three hundred bucks,” Dean says, “and shut up.”

“She’s gonna be pissed she missed it.”

“Do _not_ tell Jo.” Dean glances over at Cas, who’s utterly disengaged from the conversation. He notices, then, that Cas’s left hand is bare, and wonders where _his_ ring is. Somehow he thinks this isn’t the best time to ask for it back. “Anyway,” he says, looking back at the road, “it was a mistake, and we’re gonna fix it. No big deal.”

“All right, whatever,” Ash says, raising his hands in surrender. “So whaddya need? Records wiped? Cause that’s no problem. It’ll be like it never happened.”

“I think we’ve got it under control, Ash, thanks,” Dean says. “I mean, for all the hell we know, it _didn’t_ happen. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“Ah. So I ain’t the only one suffering from some post-alcoholic amnesia,” Ash says. “Luckily for you gentlemen, I happen to be a pro at retracing my steps. Either of you have your phones on you?”

“Mine’s dead,” Dean says. “Cas…”

Cas pulls his phone from his pocket, then hesitates.

“I ain’t gonna read your sext messages,” Ash says. “You wanna know what happened or what?”

Dean isn’t sure, from Cas’s blank expression, what his answer actually is. But he gives Ash the phone, and silence drops again as Ash prods at the screen. A couple very long minutes later, he says, “Voilà,” and hands the phone back.

“What is this?” Cas asks. Dean glances over and sees what looks like a map route with markers scattered over it.

“You ever seen Family Circus?” Ash asks. “You know the comics with little Billy and the dotted line showing him running around the yard and through the house and shit?”

“No,” Cas says.

“Swear to god, nobody reads anymore…” Ash mumbles. “ _Anyway,_ I pulled your location data for the last twelve hours and plotted it on a map. Now, everywhere you see a marker, that’s a confirmed check-in. We know exactly where you were, when, and for how long. The line here is just extrapolation. You might not’ve followed this exact route. But those markers, those are sure bets. If you’re gonna try and retrace your steps, just follow the timestamps.”

“That’s awesome,” Dean says. “Seriously, Ash. How the hell’d you do that?”

“I am a man of many talents.” They’re back on the Strip, and the traffic is slower, and Dean steals anxious glances at the phone as Cas taps through the map data.

“It’s here,” Cas says finally. “The chapel.”

“When?”

“Twelve-thirty.” He squints at the screen. “We were there for thirty-six minutes.”

“Well, let me be the first to wish you both a happy wedding day,” Ash says. “At least, the first you remember.”

Dean glares at him in the rearview. “See if there’s a number listed,” he tells Cas. “Let’s get this over with.”

“There’s a website,” Cas says. “It says they open at noon.”

Dean glances at the dashboard clock. Two hours. “All right, then, what’s next on the list? Would we have had to get a…” Somehow the words _marriage license_ seem to stick in his throat. “Is there a courthouse on there, or…”

“Hey, not to come off as non-supportive and all,” Ash says, “but I just spent the night in the desert _and_ police custody, and that jerky’s starting to creep up on me—”

“Yeah, okay, thanks for that,” Dean says. “We’ll drop you off at the hotel.”

“Actually,” Cas says, “I think I’ll get out at the hotel, too.”

“Wait, what?” Dean asks. “I thought we were gonna take care of this.”

“We are. But I’d like to do that after a shower, and breakfast, and in clothes I recognize,” Cas says. “We’re just as married now as we will be in two hours.”

“Fine,” Dean says, and changes lanes towards the hotel.

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

Sharing a hotel room is always a worse idea than it sounds.

Ash is snoring in the next room, and it resonates through the wall. Dean and Cas had bickered about who had to shower after Ash’s visit to the bathroom, with the result that Cas is now using Dean’s shower while Dean sits on the bed, disinterestedly flipping channels and debating whether to use Cas’s phone to try calling Sam again. On one hand, what’s the use of having a brother in law school if he can’t tell you how to get out of your accidental Vegas marriage to your best friend? On the other, Sam would either make fun of him the rest of his life, or he’d try to be _understanding_ about the whole thing, and Dean isn’t sure which is worse and doesn’t want to find out. So he puts off calling his brother and tells himself that Sam is fine, probably sleeping the night off in a pile of UNLV sorority girls or library books or something.

The drone of the television, Ash’s muffled snores, and the patter of the shower spray mix together in his head, becoming meaningless background noise that doesn’t quite drown out his thoughts. He’s actually getting worried about Charlie and Jo, after getting no answer on their phones or when he knocked on their door. He snatches Cas’s phone off the nightstand where it’s charging and pulls up Charlie’s Instagram, and scrolls down to the last post he remembers seeing.

 _“#Vegas, baby!”_ A group selfie with the Bellagio fountain in the background, from the night before.

 _“I’m totally getting better at the slot machines.”_ Two cherries and a lemon, blurry, on a video screen. A comment from @jobeth_h saying _“YOU CAN’T ‘GET BETTER AT’ GAMES OF CHANCE,”_ followed by one from Charlie of a smiley face with its tongue out.

 _“HOLY CRAP!! #cirquedusoleil”_ Location tagged at the Mirage.

 _“whooooo maragaratitas”_ Charlie and Jo with two women Dean doesn’t recognize, one of whom is tagged in the photo. Her profile picture is of a woman hanging upside down from a trapeze.

That’s the latest one. He taps the comment box and types, _“You and Jo ok? Where’d you end up?”_ It shows up under Cas’s name.

Dean suddenly has a horrible thought. He taps Cas’s name and pulls up his profile, dreading what he’ll see.

There are two pictures that he immediately knows are from last night. One is of the Strip from somewhere high up, but there’s no location tag. The second is of Dean leaned over a craps table, surrounded by strangers, with a pretty respectable pile of chips in front of him. He doesn’t even know the rules of craps. He wonders where that money ended up.

The next few pictures are from the road trip. Dean scrolls through them anyway, smirking at a picture of Cas and Charlie stuffing tacos in their mouths at the taqueria they stopped at the day before.

Cas doesn’t post a lot of photos, and the ones he does post are meticulously composed and edited. He has an irrational dislike of filters. A good number of the photos are of people, none of whom Dean recognizes—probably Cas, either. Dean’s told him it’s creepy to post pictures of random people, but the truth is, they’re not creepy pictures. A lot of them are kind of good.

A few are of Dean. He winces at one of him playing a guitar, from the bonfire on welcome week their first year. Cas had pestered him to go even though Dean had already decided he did not have school spirit and did not want to participate in forced socialization activities. A guitar appeared, like it always does, and somehow it ended up in his hands. God, he was _that_ guy. There’s also one of Dean pretending to sleep through Commencement the next year, and one of them at the shitty unofficial university bar celebrating Cas’s 21st birthday. There’s one of Dean hunched over an engineering textbook, one of the rare posts with a caption: _“Don’t worry, @lawboy83. Dean is working very hard.”_ Sam had liked it. There’s one from graduation, Dean and Cas in their stupid robes and hats, with Ellen and Jo, and Sam and Sam’s girlfriend Jess, and Cas’s sister Hannah. A few from the camping trip they took with friends that summer, before Dean moved to Houston and Cas to Boston, but they’re all of flowers and trees and deer. No more pictures of Dean until this weekend. A few of an old church, a snowy street, a rocky beach.

Even with Cas’s sparse posting, there’s a decent chronicle of their friendship here. Someone who didn’t know them could get a pretty good idea of what the past few years were like. But Dean’s no closer to figuring out the last twelve hours.

The bathroom door opens. Cas emerges fully dressed, his t-shirt slightly damp from steam and clinging to his chest, rubbing a towel through his hair. He spots Dean with his phone and freezes.

“Sorry,” Dean says. “I was checking Charlie’s Instagram. She, uh, I think something with acrobats. And booze.” He clears his throat.

“Hmm,” Cas says, and takes his phone. He sits down on the extreme edge of the bed, about as far from Dean as he can possibly be, and swipes his finger down the screen. He squints. “You’re playing dice.”

“Yeah, apparently pretty well,” Dean says. “No clue.”

“Me either.” Cas resumes towelling his hair. “Actually, that gives me an idea. Ash’s map places us all over the Strip last night. I’m sure lots of people were taking photos. There’s a good chance we’re in some of them.”

“Probably,” Dean says, “but we’ll never find them. There’ve gotta be thousands of photos from Vegas last night.”

“The map,” Cas says. “We can cross-reference. Search the location tags at the times we were in each place. It’s a long shot, but all the map alone tells us is where we were, not what we did.”

Dean shrugs. “If you can make it work, go for it. I’m gonna hit the shower. I don’t wanna miss the breakfast buffet.”

“Of course.” Cas is peering intently at the phone, tapping and swiping between screens. Dean leaves him to it, and hopes there’s some hot water left.

He steps into the shower and tries not to think, to let the spray relax him. It’s all gonna work out. Cas was weird in the car, but whatever was bugging him, it seems like he’s over it now. This is just gonna be something they laugh about down the road, one particularly strange chapter in their friendship. Probably Cas will snap a picture of their annullment papers or something. 

Assuming they got hitched at all, that is. Dean’s still not convinced. _Okay, yes,_ maybe they did wake up in bed together. There could be a totally different explanation. Maybe the rings were a joke, maybe they ended up at the chapel on a dare and one of them finally broke before they went through with it. Maybe they thought it would be funny to rent a honeymoon suite, and they drank a bunch of room service champagne, and Dean threw up all over his clothes for not the first time, and he decided it was easier to just strip and crawl into bed and worry about the repercussions of his actions in the morning. That is an absolutely logical, characteristic chain of events that could’ve led them here, all without any awkward, friendship-breaking sexual or romantic shenanigans. By the time he gets out of the shower, Dean has convinced himself that this is probably what happened.

He wraps a towel around his hips and opens the door, releasing a cloud of steam into the chilled room. It clears to reveal Cas sitting in the same spot on the edge of the bed, still staring at his phone. Dean walks over to his suitcase, still lying open on the floor from when they first checked in, and snags some clean clothes. He starts to go back into the bathroom, stops, turns. “Hey, Cas, what’s up?” he asks. “Find something?”

“I did,” Cas says. He stands up, slowly, holds out the phone to Dean. “This, uh… this was apparently taken about an hour before we ended up at the chapel. At the top of the Stratosphere.”

Dean takes the phone. It’s a video clip, the thumbnail showing the Strip from above, a lot like the view in Cas’s picture, with figures in the foreground lining a railing at the edge of an observation deck. When he presses play, the shot becomes a wobbly pan across the deck, then a nausea-inducing swing around to reveal a girl in a sparkly top saying, “Top of the world! Wooooooo!” It cuts off.

“Okay, what’d I just watch?” Dean asks.

“In the background,” Cas says. “Upper left.”

Dean presses play again. He tries to focus on the upper left despite the shaky camera work, and about three seconds in, he sees it: two of the figures at the railing are them. Unlike the others, they’re not looking out at the lights; they’re turned towards each other. One of them moves closer, and a second later the camera swings around to the shrieking girl again.

Dean swallows. “Okay, did I just see…”

He plays the clip again, turns down the volume because he needs to focus, needs to be sure. 

The camera wobbles across. There they are, facing each other. Dean watches himself lean closer, watches Cas lean in to meet him. A beat, and then the camera swings around. He replays the video.

“Dean?” Cas says.

“Just… give me a second.”

The camera moves. Dean moves. Cas moves.

The phone rings, and Dean nearly drops it. The video vanishes, replaced by the incoming call screen and Charlie’s face. He answers it. “Charlie?”

“Dean?” Charlie says. She looks like she hasn’t slept. “I thought I called Cas.”

“Cas. Yeah.” Dean looks over at Cas, who’s watching him with a slight frown. “You did. Uh, where are you?”

Charlie grins. “Moondor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know a lot less than I should about Las Vegas. And the arrest process. And Instagram. *i-tried.gif*


	3. Shake the Glitter Off Your Clothes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a trapeze artist comes between her and Jo, Charlie drowns her sorrows in PVP combat with a little help from her friends. Dean and Cas take advantage of a breakfast buffet they're not technically entitled to, whereupon Charlie reveals a twist in the story of the previous night's shenanigans.

They find Charlie in a ballroom at the Rio, which has been crammed full of so many tables cluttered with laptops and empty Red Bulls, it looks like a LAN party in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. She’s so intent on her screen she doesn’t see them approaching, and Dean’s reaching out to tap her on the shoulder when she yells “BOOM!” and he stumbles backwards into Cas. Oblivious, Charlie rips off her headset. “Chaos207, you can suck my—”

“Dean!” someone says loudly from a little way down the table, and all three of their heads snap in that direction. Kevin—looking as bleary-eyed and manic as the last time Dean had seen him, cramming for finals—gives them a grin. “Hey, and Cas. You guys here to play?”

“’Fraid not,” Dean says, glancing back down at Charlie, who’s going through the spoils of her conquest and doing a little victory dance in her seat. She’s wearing her full Moondor regalia; about half the people in the room are in costume. “You guys been here all night?”

“Who’s Chaos207?” Cas asks.

“A douchebag,” says a girl with short, chunky blonde hair across from Charlie.

“Total douchebag,” Charlie agrees. “This was a moral victory as well as a strategic one.”

The blonde girl shuts her laptop. “I’m hitting the breakfast bar. I’m gonna be the walking dead if I don’t get some protein in me.”

“I’ve got a Slim Jim left,” Kevin offers.

“No one wants your meat stick, Kevin,” she says, and _thwacks_ him on the arm with her laptop cable as she’s winding it up. He yelps and rubs his arm, but he’s still grinning. She looks back at Charlie and jerks her head toward the door. “Wanna come with?”

“Yeah. Guys?” Charlie lifts her eyebrows questioningly.

“We’re not staying in this hotel,” Cas says, and Dean rolls his eyes.

“Just act like you’re with us,” Charlie says, as she gathers up her stuff. “Don’t look like you’re terrified of being arrested over bacon and eggs.” She looks Dean over. “Too bad you’re not dressed up. Told you to bring your stuff… what?”

Dean stops in the middle of making a slashing motion at his throat and feels several sets of eyes boring into him, one of them belonging to Cas. “Never mind,” he says, hastily. “Let’s just… do the breakfast thing. Come on.” He nudges Cas towards the door, determinedly ignoring the twitch at the corner of his mouth that looks suspiciously like repressed laughter.

Several of the others, including Kevin and a handful of people Dean doesn’t know, accompany them to the buffet. Charlie’s ecstatic to find hash brown casserole, as only someone who’s subsisted on caffeine and sugar for twelve hours can be. Dean looks across the bar at Cas, who’s loaded his plate with chunks of honeydew and cantelope and the healthiest-looking muffin on offer. He raises an eyebrow as Dean adds a third slice of bacon to a plate already heaped with scrambled eggs, and Dean pointedly grabs a fourth piece and bites off half of it right there. Cas shakes his head, but then edges towards the hash browns and spoons a chunk of them onto the rim of his plate.

They sit at a table with Charlie, Kevin, the blond girl whom Charlie introduces as Kate, a scrawny guy named Garth who has two plates in front of him piled impossibly high, and a handful of other people whose names and faces and identifying characteristics come at him too fast to process all at once. Donna, he thinks it was, is debating a guy possibly named Ronald about DLC; all he catches of Charlie’s conversation with Becca or Becky is the word “tumbler” and a few other things he’s pretty sure aren’t words at all. Kate works her way through a pile of bacon that puts Dean’s to shame, and she catches his eye and toasts their mutual eventual heart attacks with a glass of orange juice.

Cas picks through his food in that fastidious way that’s one of the only indicators of his strict, upper-class upbringing. Dean remembers genuinely not having realized he chewed with his mouth open until freshman year when he was sitting in the dining hall across from Cas, who had paused with his delicately-held fork halfway to his mouth to stare in horror. Dean spent the next several weeks as tense at meals as Cas always looked, but by the end of the semester he found himself actually chewing (mouth closed) and swallowing each bite of food before taking a drink, and he knew, he _knew_ Cas gloated to himself about that for the rest of the year.

Everyone else is absorbed in their own conversations or dipping in and out of each other’s; only Dean and Cas aren’t talking. Dean’s gaze falls to Cas’s left hand, which rests in his lap on top of a folded napkin, and he wonders for at least the second time where his ring is. Not that he cares that Cas took it off or anything; it’s just that it’s his ring and he likes it and he’d like to have it back once this is all over, if not before. They should’ve just swapped back in the hotel. Why hadn’t he just asked for it then, and given Cas back his own ring, so there’d be one less awkward moment to deal with later? He stares down at Cas’s hand. He remembers thinking about this, even starting to say something, but then stopping because…

“Dean?”

He blinks and looks up. Cas’s brows are knit with concern.

“You really should eat,” he’s saying. “Bacon and toast, at least. That’s supposedly good for a hangover.”

“You’ve never even had a hangover,” Dean says.

“True, but it always seemed to work when I made it for you.”

“D’awww,” comes Kevin’s voice from Cas’s other side.

“Shut it,” Dean says, but Charlie and Becky have already looked up from their conversation curiously, and now it seems like every eye is on him again. He ducks his head towards his plate and shoves eggs into his mouth.

Charlie seems to sense the awkwardness and deftly changes tacks. “So did you guys ever hook back up with the others, or what?” she asks. “I had a bunch of messages from Sam this morning, but not a peep from Ash or… anybody else.”

“Haven’t been able to get Sam,” Dean says. “Ash… well, let’s just say he had a close encounter. He’s sleeping it off.”

“Weren’t _you_ with Jo?” Cas asks, and at that Charlie’s face clouds almost imperceptibly. She shrugs it off and starts fiddling with a carton of chocolate milk.

“Haven’t seen her since the bar after Cirque,” Charlie says. “Kevin actually texted me right after she took off, so I’ve been here pretty much ever since.”

“Wait, Jo ditched you?” Dean asks.

“Well, not exactly. I mean…” She sighs. “She asked me to tag along, but it was kind of like, I knew she didn’t want me to, you know? Which is fine. I’m sure they had fun.”

“They?” Cas asks.

Something clicks in Dean’s memory. “Instagram girl? The acrobat?”

“Wendy,” Charlie says, with just the barest inflection that sets off a deeply instinctual _oh shit_ alarm in Dean’s brain. She shrugs and takes a drink of milk. “I mean, she’s super cool, and they have a lot in common, so… yeah.”

An awkward silence falls; Dean sees Kate mouth the word _ouch_ to herself. Charlie shakes herself, and then says, “So, you haven’t heard from Sam at all?”

“Uh, no,” Dean says. “I mean, he texted at like three a.m. asking where everybody was, but he’s not picking up and he’s not in the room.”

“Wait, the room?” Charlie says. “Like, the room you guys got, or _their_ room?”

“Whose room?” Dean says.

Charlie goggles at him. “Sam and Jess?”

“Jess?” He looks at Cas, who stares back blankly and unhelpfully.

“What the hell did you idiots do last night?” Charlie says. “Do you not even remember the wedding?”

“The, uh…” Dean scrambles. “Yeah, about that, we… uh… we were just…”

“Oh my god, you meatball,” Charlie says. “You seriously got so trashed you don’t remember your brother’s crazy Vegas wedding?”

Dean’s mind, which had been barrelling blindly toward some unknown bullshit explanation for what happened the night before, slams on the brakes and fishtails right off the road. “The…” he says, dumbly. “Uh. Sam’s wedding?”

“Wow,” Kevin supplies helpfully. “I’ll have whatever you guys had.”

“You’re serious,” Charlie says. “Wow. Okay. So, what’s the last thing you do remember? Is it karaoke? Because you were already like two and a half sheets to the wind at that point.”

“Just…” Dean waves her off of that tangent, while trying to ignore Cas’s narrowed eyes in his peripheral vision. “Just start with the wedding. No, start with… when exactly did Jess show up?”

“It was a last-minute thing,” Charlie says. “She texted Sam while we were at that first bar because her friends decided to do Vegas instead of Tahoe, remember? Oh, wait, actually… pretty sure you were up on stage singing ‘Tainted Love’ when that happened.”

“Oh, shit,” Dean says, and runs a hand over his face. “Okay, that sounds horribly familiar.”

“You could’ve stopped at ‘horrible,’” Charlie says.

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

_“I nailed it,” Dean insists, grinning, and takes a drink. The bottle comes back down harder than he intended._

_Sam scoffs incredulously. “You got bored halfway through and tried to sing ‘Hell’s Bells’  over the music,” Sam says. “Someone had to help you off stage.”_

_Jess is nearly doubled over and laughing so hard there are tears in her eyes, which makes Dean happy, so he doesn’t really care about Sam making fun of him. Charlie and Jo are up at the DJ’s booth to see if they have anything by Heart, and Ash is making his way through his own personal pitcher of beer and occasionally wincing at the butchering of “Bad Company” currently happening onstage. Cas is quiet, tucked into the back corner of the booth and picking at the label on his bottle; but he’s smiling softly, and that makes Dean happy, too. He leans back and stretches his arms out along the back of the seat, behind the empty spot where Jo had been sitting on one side and behind Cas on the other side. Even drunk!Dean knows this is not a particularly smooth move, but Cas doesn’t seem to mind._

_“I am so sorry I missed that,” Jess says when she recovers. “Okay, so how many drinks do I need to get in you before you take requests?”_

_“Oh, I’ll take requests any time,” Dean says. “Whaddya wanna hear? A little Bowie? Billy Idol? Huh? ‘White Wedding’?”_

_“Oooh, I like that one,” Jess says, at the same time Sam says, “God, no.”_

_“Come on, it’s perfect!” Dean says. “It’s not Vegas till somebody gets drunk married.”_

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

“Anyway,” Charlie says, breaking Dean out of his reverie. “After the actual talented singers among us won our tickets to Cirque, we all split up. I think Sam and Jess went to see a magic show or something? And I don’t know where you guys went, which I’m guessing you don’t either.”

“We’re still piecing that together,” Dean says. “So, uh… when exactly was this wedding?”

Charlie purses her lips. “Let’s see. Cirque was over at like ten, and I was here by like… eleven, eleven fifteen?” Kevin nods. “And I actually didn’t see the text until super late because I wasn’t checking my phone. Oh, the text!” She snatches her phone off the table and swipes through it. “Yeah, you actually texted me at like fifteen till midnight. I have no idea what this one says… But _this_ one is definitely saying Sam’s getting married, and then you sent me your location at this wedding chapel.”

She passes Dean her phone. He makes a face at the gibberish coming from his side of the conversation, then checks the time on the last two texts she mentioned. At 12:38, there’s a location message with a big red pin on top of the Whole Lotta Love Wedding Chapel. It matches up perfectly with the timeline Ash constructed.

He and Cas weren’t at the chapel to get married. They were there to watch _Sam and Jess_ get married.

Dean looks over at Cas—who’s gone back to his breakfast, carefully peeling the paper shell off his granola muffin like he hasn’t just had the relief of his life. He tears off a tiny piece of muffin and pops it into his mouth, and only then does he seem to notice Dean staring at him. “Yes?” he asks.

“Look,” Charlie continues, “whenever you do find Sam, if I were you, I’d maybe _not_ tell him you were so drunk you don’t remember being the best man at his wedding. I know he’s the most understanding person in the world, but there’s a line. A wedding’s a pretty big thing to forget, you know?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and turns his attention back to his now-cold bacon and eggs, which are still more appealing than watching Cas calmly eating a muffin as though everything they thought they knew about last night wasn’t flipped on its head. If they didn’t get married, what’s with the rings? And the hotel room? Even if everything else was a joke, that kiss at the top of the Stratosphere was real, wasn’t it?

Here he’d hoped that figuring out what happened at the wedding chapel would make the whole rest of the night make sense, and instead it just made it more confusing. He’d also hoped that recovering any missing memories would jostle the others loose, but nothing other than the stupid karaoke thing presents itself.

And on top of all of it, Cas seems to genuinely not care whether they got married or not. “ _Why does it matter what happened?” “We’re just as married now as we will be in two hours.”_ How could it not matter? Dean finds himself staring at Cas’s ringless left hand again, and wondering why he’s still wearing Cas’s ring like an idiot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, bitches, bet you thought you saw the last of this fic. So did I, but this chapter miraculously survived the death of my old hard drive (thanks, Google Drive), and I just now found it. So yeah, good news if anyone's still reading it! (Is anyone still reading it?) Also: I might actually remember how this is supposed to end. Hopefully there won't be 84 years between updates from here on out.
> 
> As always, this will be crossposted to my [tumblr](http://ashesinyourhair.tumblr.com/fic) shortly in case you feel inclined to reblog it over there.


	4. You Wanna Cash Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still reeling from the revelation about what transpired in the Whole Lotta Love Wedding Chapel and Cas's blasé reaction to it, Dean heads back to the hotel, where he finds Jo not-coping with her own relationship troubles. He also finds out that his phone has miraculously survived and recharged, just in time to deliver yet another bombshell.

If Dean thought the revelation that he and Cas weren’t married after all would ease the tension between them, he finds out how wrong he is when they part ways with Charlie and head back to the hotel. That car ride is in the running for the most awkward of Dean’s life, neck-in-neck with the one earlier with Ash, and the time Dean drove Sam to prom and they stopped to pick up Sam’s date and she recognized Dean from… well, he still isn’t a hundred percent sure where. At least he probably won’t get punched in the nose this time. Though, by the time they pull into the parking lot, he thinks he’d prefer Cas punching him to silently ignoring him like he’s been doing since breakfast.

Dean kills the engine. There are words beginning to form on the back of his tongue, but Cas is already out of the car, and Dean looks over just in time to see the door _clunk_ shut behind him. Awesome. He yanks the keys from the ignition and gets out, pausing to lock up. 

When he turns around, Cas is right behind him. “ _Jesus,_ Cas.”

Cas doesn’t bat an eye. “I thought I should give this back to you,” he says. “Now that… we know.”

He’s holding something in his palm; Dean tears his gaze from Cas’s eyes and sees his own ring, gleaming in the almost-high-noon sunlight. He plucks it from Cas’s hand and slips it back onto his right ring finger, the familiar weight of it seeming to nudge him a little closer to balance. Yet when he slips Cas’s ring off his left hand and drops it into his waiting palm, he feels all wrong again.

Cas’s fingers close around his ring, which then disappears into his pocket. “Cas—” Dean begins.

“I think I’ll drop our suits back at the rental shop,” Cas says, nodding towards back of the Impala where the suits are hanging. “If you don’t mind me taking the car. I checked the website, and there’s a surcharge if they aren’t returned by two o’clock.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dean hears himself saying, and hands Cas his keys. “You, uh… want my credit card just in case?”

“I rented them on mine,” Cas says. “But thanks anyway. Do you want my phone?”

“Nah, I’m gonna try to get mine working,” Dean says. “Keep yours on you in case Baby has a heat stroke or something.” Which would never, ever in a million years happen; but Dean knows if he has Cas’s phone, he’s gonna end up obsessively scouring various social networks for more clues about the _still mostly unresolved_ mystery of whatever happened between them last night, and he knows how fucking sad that is. Especially since Cas couldn’t care less.

Cas gets into the car and pulls back out of the parking spot, and Dean watches him drive off till the glint of sunlight on the Impala’s back window winks out. 

Fucking sad.

He stops on the way back to the room to check on Ash, who answers the knock at his door with a truly impressive snore. Dean snorts and moves on, swipes his key card at the adjacent door and pushes it open.

“ _Finally!”_ Jo says as he walks in. She’s propped up on pillows and cushions stolen from the rest of the room’s furniture and piled at the headboard of what is, clearly, no longer Dean’s bed, and watching some extreme nature survival show on the TV. The remnants of a burger and fries and a movie concession stand’s worth of candy surround her. “I was starting to think you’d all ditched me here and gone back home.”

“You look like you’re doing fine on your own,” Dean says, and snags a licorice stick from a half-eaten pack at her feet. 

Jo scoffs. “Yeah, no thanks to one Charlene whatever-her-middle-name-is Bradbury.”

“Charlie? I thought you—” Dean starts to say _I thought you ditched her for a trapeze artist,_ but thinks better of it and finishes, “—split up after karaoke.”

“ _You_ remember karaoke?” Jo asks. “I figured everything after dinner would be one tequila-flavored blur for you. By the way—Soft Cell? Not one of your better choices.”

“Yeah, so I’m told,” Dean says. “We can’t all be Ann and Nancy Wilson.”

Jo beams. “Reigning karaoke queen of whatever crappy bar I find myself in. Course, without Charlie—” She catches herself, and pops a Gobstopper into her mouth in lieu of finishing the thought.

“Speaking of,” Dean says. “She’s over at the Rio, LARPing it up with Kevin and a bunch of Moondor folks. Figured you’d be there, too.”

She shrugs and crunches the jawbreaker between her teeth. “Don’t do that,” Dean says automatically, and she rolls her eyes like the seven-year-old Dean swears she was just a couple years ago.

“Was she having fun?” Jo asks, in a sardonic monotone clearly meant to convey that she doesn’t particularly care what the answer is. Against all prior experience, she still sometimes acts like she can put one past him.

“She kicked some guy’s ass. In-game, anyway. Though she could probably take him hand-to-hand, sounds like.”

“Was it Chaos?” Jo asks, forgetting to properly feign disinterest.

“Yep.”

“ _Good,_ ” she says. “He’s such a prick. You know, he wrecked our raid last week and—no, I don’t even want to talk about it. But he had it coming.”

Dean takes the box of jawbreakers from her and pops a couple into his mouth. “Yeah, bet you wish you’d been there to see that.”

Jo fixes him with a look of utter disdain. “Do you honestly think you’re subtle when you do that?”

“What? I’m just making conversation.”

“About my love life.”

Dean scoffs, though with the jawbreakers in his mouth it comes out mostly as spit. “You don’t have a love life.” Jo pelts a mini Snickers at his head; it misses and goes skidding under the TV stand. “Hey, mooning over your best friend doesn’t count as a love life, _Dawson’s Creek._ ”

Jo barks out an incredulous laugh. “Oh, _I’m sorry,_ ” she says. “I’m just surprised we’re finally talking about your big giant crush on Cas.” She bites off a chunk of licorice with an emphatic _snap._

“Yeah, whatever, Crazy Train,” Dean says, and turns his attention to the TV, where Bear Grylls is in the Arctic getting ready to do something that will undoubtedly be all manner of hot, right up until he ruins it by eating a fish raw.

“Do you actually find yourself convincing?” Jo asks. “Cause I haven’t seen you in this much denial since you thought you were straight.”

“Least I didn’t ditch Cas in a bar to hook up with some acrobat,” Dean shoots back.

Jo’s eyes blaze. She pushes herself up off the pillows and sits up cross-legged, sending various packets of candy in every direction. “Okay, one? She was an _aerial performance artist._ Two, I did not ‘hook up’ with her. And three, Charlie’s the one who took off and left _me_ , so if you want to go lecture somebody, start with her. I’m sick of everything being my fault.”

Dean groans. “Okay, look—I don’t know what happened with you two last night. I mean, I barely know what happened with _me_ last night. But according to Charlie, she bowed out so you could take your shot with the aerial whatever chick.”

“I didn’t _want_ a shot with that chick,” Jo says. “Dean, I don’t even _like_ Cirque du Soleil. It gives me gymnastics flashbacks. You know how much I hated gymnastics. The whole reason I went was because Charlie’s been going on and on about seeing that show since it came out, and I figured, _why not, I like the Beatles, I can just close my eyes or something._ And then we ran into Wendy after, and she invited us— _both of us_ —to come see their practice space. I thought Charlie’d be all over that. And then she just took off, and I didn’t want to be rude, so I went by myself. By the way—those springy bouncy bungee things they practice in are _way_ less fun than they look. I have bruises in weird places.” She snatches the Gobstoppers back from Dean and flops back against the pillows.

“You need to call Charlie,” Dean says.

“I think I’d rather wallow in self-pity for a while if it’s all the same to you.”

“Your call.”

Jo’s eyes light up. “Oh, yeah! Speaking of calls.” She points. “Your phone was making a racket earlier. I was gonna check it, but it’s kind of gross for reasons I don’t wanna know about, so I didn’t and it shut up eventually.”

Dean retrieves his phone from where it’s plugged in by the bed. Apparently it was just run down after all. He makes a half-assed attempt to clean it off by wiping it on his t-shirt, which somehow makes it worse; and there’s an overly-sweet, strawberryish scent clinging to it. Trying to touch the thing as little as possible, he wakes it up and goes about sorting through his notifications.

The number next to the texts icon makes him anxious just to look at, so he skips that for now and sorts through the other stuff. Two alerts that Cas posted something on Instagram—the ones he’d found earlier, from the casino and the Stratosphere. Ones for Charlie’s photos, and then some duplicates from where they posted to her Twitter. A bunch of the same messages from Sam that everybody else got, plus one he hasn’t seen before that says, “I don’t know where the hell everyone is, but we’re going to IHOP. Catch up with you later.”

There are a shit ton of new pictures on his camera roll, most of which are too unfocused, dark, or motion-blurred to make out. Videos, too, most of them one or two seconds long and apparently the result of being too drunk to make the phone just take a picture. An embarrassing number of selfies. He briefly considers putting all of it into an album called STOP DRINKING, DUMBASS before remembering that he still has no idea how to move pictures to different albums because Cas said he’d show him and then never did. Then he sees the other video.

The thumbnail is blurred, so he has no idea what it’s going to be, but it’s longer than the rest. He taps the “play” icon. The picture wobbles and sways—lights, asphalt, bright colors, people—and then swings around 180° till it’s aimed at his face. Christ, he _does_ look like shit. The angle and the concrete wall behind his head suggest that he’s sitting on the sidewalk, against the side of a building, a drunken human disaster who cannot work his fucking phone camera.

_“Hey, Cas,”_ the Dean in the video says. _“I, uh, tried to call you, but—”_

Dean fumbles for the volume button and jabs the screen at the same time trying to shut the thing up, but it’s obviously too late.

“What was that?” Jo asks. “Did you say ‘Cas’?”

“Mind your own business,” he grumbles.

“Your business is all up on my bed,” Jo says.

“It’s _my_ bed. Ash is drooling on your bed.”

“Whatever, you’re blocking the TV.” She kicks at him. “Go tell Cas you want to have his babies. Go. Shoo.”

“This is exactly why I never wanted a little sister,” Dean says, shoving his phone of shame into his pocket.

“Sucks to be you.”

_It really does,_ Dean thinks, and shuts himself in the bathroom.

He manages to get the phone mostly cleaned off by scrubbing at it with a wet towel for a few minutes. The volume buttons still don’t click but seem to work, and he turns it down low enough that he has to hold it up to his ear to hear it, which is fine since he doesn’t really want to stare at his sad, drunken self anyway.

_“Hey, Cas,”_ video!Dean begins again. _“I, uh, tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up. Which, you know. I get it. I wouldn’t wanna talk to me either. Hell, I_ don’t _wanna talk to me. I’m talking to this fucking phone, and I really just wanna punch myself in the face, so… I figure you probably feel the same way about me right now.”_

“What the fuck did you do?” Dean asks himself.

_“So, listen. I found Sam and Jess. And apparently they’re gonna get hitched, ’cause it’s Vegas and something about her parents, and I don’t know what the fuck—”_ Inaudible mumbling and static. “ _Anyway. Figured you’d wanna be there. I don’t know, maybe not. I’ll get Sam to tell you where, ’cause I don’t know where the fuck we are. But that’s not what this is about._

_“I just… I freaked out. Okay? I don’t… I’m not good at this shit, Cas. I wasn’t…”_ Staticky sigh. _“I don’t know what to do when stuff changes. You know? It’s a crappy excuse, but there it is. I can’t just… change how I feel, or how I think, all at once like that. It just… it takes me a while to process it, and… I don’t even know what to say. I’m still trying to figure it out. And I know you think… no, I don’t know what you think. But I know you’re pissed at me, and that’s fine, you should definitely be pissed at me. But probably not for what… you think you should be pissed at me for. If that makes sense._

_“I know I say the wrong thing, like, ninety percent of the time. I say shit I don’t mean, or I don’t say shit I do mean, whatever. And the reason I’m recording this is, I know it’s a fucking mess, but if I had to say it to your face, I couldn’t do it. And I have to do it. So here goes.”_

The silence stretches on for about five seconds before Dean pulls the phone away from his ear to check that the video’s still going. It is; the Dean in the video is staring off into space, trying to put the right words together or work up the nerve to say them or both. Maybe he’s just spacing out. Finally he looks back at the camera, and takes a breath.

_“I love you, Cas. Okay? That’s… that’s all there is to it. And I wanted you to know that. Sorry I fucked it up.”_

The video cuts off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, you. Person who's still reading this fic even though I haven't updated it in over a year. Yeah, you. I love you.


	5. Remember What You Told Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean follows the last clue to the top of the tallest freestanding observation deck in the United States, and if that doesn't prove how much he cares about what happened with Cas, he doesn't know what could.

The bar at the top of the Stratosphere is already open when Dean gets there. He briefly entertains chasing his emerging memories of the night before back into whatever dark corner they’d been stuffed in with a little hair of the dog, but thinks better of it. A woman wearing a bright pink sundress and carrying a drink to match slips past him at the doorway to the observation deck, and the whiff of artificial strawberry trailing behind her glass answers the question of what was all over his phone this morning. Cas and his stupid mixed drinks.

Dean stops a good several feet from the railing and stares out over the city. Vegas in the daytime is pretty damn depressing, like any carnival, really. Everything looks better in the soft glow of neon that hides the chipped paint and the dirt and makes cheap brass look like gold. Off in the distance he spots an IHOP and wonders if it’s the one Sam and Jess went to. If they’re still there, eating a honeymoon breakfast of pancakes that the waitress loaded with whipped cream and berries for free because they told her they were newlyweds. He’s happy for them, no bullshit. He wouldn’t be there when Jess’s parents find out, not for any amount of money; but he knows that, conventional or not, marrying Jess is what Sam’s wanted for a long time. But now Dean’s thinking about what _he’s_ wanted, maybe for just as long, and how he reacted when he thought he’d gotten it. How it feels now, knowing he doesn’t.

He twists anxiously at the ring on his right hand. His left is bare now, no other ring with its terrifying weight that he’d somehow gotten used to in just a few hours, so now he feels too light without it, untethered. He sighs and shoves both hands in his pockets.

He remembers the bar now— _this_ bar, specifically, the one he went to with Cas after they all split up post-karaoke. Remembers that Cas drove here because Dean was still plastered, that he’d coaxed Dean up to the top of the dizzingly high hotel by promising he didn’t have to even go near the windows if he didn’t want to. And they’d sat at the bar while Cas sipped that strawberry abomination of his and Dean worked up the nerve to… well, to go out on the deck, ostensibly, because he knew Cas wanted to take pictures. But other than the possibility of vomiting over the railing of the tallest freestanding observation deck in the United States, Dean really wasn’t all that concerned with his uneasy relationship to heights at that moment. All he’d been able to think about was how he was pressed hip-to-hip with Cas on their respective barstools, and the corners of Cas’s eyes were crinkled up with laughter, and he kept looking from them to Cas’s fingertips resting on the base of his glass and thinking about covering Cas’s hand with his until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and—

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

_“Fuck,” he says, and snatches his phone up out of the pool of pink liquid, while Cas rights his glass and dabs ineffectually at the puddle with a bar napkin. “Sorry. Shit. ’D I spill it on you?”_

_“No, you missed,” Cas says, and murmurs a thanks and an apology as the bartender mops up the rest of his drink. “You did me a favor. It was going straight to my head.”_

_Dean blinks at him. “Well,” he says slowly, “we could always get you another one.”_

_Cas chuckles. “No, thank you. One of us needs to keep our wits about us.”_

_“It’s Vegas, Cas,” Dean says, for what feels like the millionth time. “I’ve never seen you drunk, not even in four years of college.”_

_“And you never will,” Cas replies._

_“Never say never.”_

_Cas smiles. “I guess I shouldn’t. I never thought you’d agree to come up here with me.”_

_“Yeah, see?” And Dean makes a decision, right there; he pushes off the barstool, grips the edge of the bar till he’s sure he’s steady on his feet. “Come on. Let’s go check out the view.”_

_Cas’s smile morphs into furrowed-brow concern. “Dean, are you sure that’s a good idea?”_

_“Sure I’m sure. I’ve got just enough drinks in me to take the edge off. I’ll be fine.” He holds out a hand. “Promise I won’t puke on you.”_

_“Well, in that case.” Cas stares at Dean’s hand, hesitating, for just a moment. Then he slips his hand into Dean’s, stands up._

_Dean grins. Cas’s hand is warm in his, and he’s smiling at Dean in that way that makes his eyes go all soft and that fills Dean up with warmth and stupid, sappy thoughts. “All right,” he hears himself saying. “Let’s do this before I chicken out.”_

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

The door opens behind him. He doesn’t turn around, even as he’s picturing it being Cas, because things like that don’t happen, and Cas doesn’t even know where he is. He’s so sure of this that he doesn’t react right away when he hears his name.

“ _Dean.”_

Dean snaps out of his reverie, turns around. Cas is staring at him with that same concerned expression from the night before; his phone is in his hand.

“Your, um. Your location was on when I got out of the rental place, so I…” Cas says. “If you’d rather be alone, I can go.”

“No,” Dean says. He looks at his shoes, like he’s expecting to find answers down there, forces himself to look back up and meet Cas’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Cas.”

“So am I,” Cas says. “I let things get out of hand. I knew that… that wasn’t what we were, but everything felt so surreal, it seemed harmless to pretend… I just think it’s best that we put this behind us, if we can. I don’t want to lose you as a friend over a stupid, drunken mistake.”

It’s been a while since college, but Dean never really forgot what it was like listening to Cas talk and barely being able to process all the information coming at him, like most of the conversation was happening in Cas’s head and Dean was only getting the highlights. He knows he’s staring blankly, just like he always did at those times, and some part of him expects Cas to snap out of his stream-of-conscious reverie with a soft smile and fill in the blanks. That it’s all going to make sense. But Cas doesn’t say anything, and he’s definitely not smiling, so it’s up to Dean to piece it all together amid the increasingly awkward silence.

“You, uh…” he says, as the pieces labelled _I let things get out of hand_ and _seemed harmless to pretend_ and _stupid, drunken mistake_ bump together ineffectually in his head. “You wanted…”

“I don’t want anything,” Cas says. “Except to fix this, if possible.” He looks wretched. Dean wonders how he’s missed that all day, thinking Cas was utterly indifferent to everything that had happened. Maybe he hadn’t been the only one putting on a show.

“Cas, do you remember what happened?” he asks. “I mean, all of it?”

Cas looks down. “Yes,” he says. “Other than a few bits and pieces. I still don’t remember you playing craps, but the… critical aspects, yes. I think it’s all come back to me.”

“So…” Dean ventures, “the, uh, hotel? Cause that’s still kind of hazy for me, and I mean, I’ve been wondering…”

“Nothing happened. You were… a perfect gentleman,” Cas says, and a corner of his mouth twitches, but no smile makes it to the surface. “We both got caught up in the moment. But you were right, this morning, even though it didn’t happen like we thought. What did happen was a mistake, and even if fixing it isn’t as straightforward as getting an annullment would’ve been, I still think we should try.”

Dean’s phone buzzes in his pocket. A second later, Cas’s phone lets out an inappropriately cheerful chirp in his hand, and he glances down at it, then at Dean. “Did you text me?”

“No?” Dean says, trying to re-orient himself again amidst a conversation that keeps getting away from him.

“It’s a video,” Cas says, and before Dean can form the words _No, wait,_ he taps his screen.

_“Hey, Cas,”_ Dean hears himself saying again. _“I, uh, tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up. Which, you know. I get it.”_

“This is from last night,” Cas says, and Dean realizes the buzz from his phone meant it had been choking on that video for the last hour and had finally, horribly managed to send it at the absolute worst moment.

“Cas—” Dean says, but Cas holds up a hand to silence him, and so he just stands there helplessly, listening to his sad drunk self spill his sad drunk feelings, and wishing he was on the ground so there was a chance of it opening up and swallowing him.

_“I love you, Cas. Okay? That’s… that’s all there is to it. And I wanted you to know that. Sorry I fucked it up.”_

Dean winces and turns away, walks out towards the railing because the thousand-foot drop to the sun-bleached pavement suddenly seems less horrifying than ever looking Cas in the eye again. He deeply, deeply hates cellphones and the shitty signal he’s had ever since they hit desert, but he especially hates himself and his stupid drunken choices and his even stupider feelings.

“Oh,” is all Cas says when he finally breaks the silence, and Dean’s brain revs up in preparation for the load of bullshit it’s about to construct by way of an excuse for crossing the Line That Must Not Be Crossed and fucking up the best friendship he’s ever had in his life. “Is this… were you…”

“Plastered? Yeah,” Dean says, without turning around. “Wish I could say it was the booze talking, but, you know. Fuck.” There’s a prickly heat under his skin, that feverish dizzying feeling of shame he usually deals with by shoving it down and chasing it with something hard, but that’s probably not the best choice right now. He can drink himself into a stupor _after_ he’s half a continent away from Cas again.

“Dean…” Cas says, and the pity he can pick out of just the one syllable is more than he can take.

“Listen, Cas, let’s just forget—” Dean says, turning back around, but whatever he was about to say turns into a startled _mmpf_ as Cas’s mouth collides with his. He stumbles back a step, which has him desperately flailing for a handhold as some distant functional part of his brain shrieks that he’s inches away from open air and a splattery death. Then Cas grips his hip and pulls Dean against him, his other hand twisting in Dean’s hair; and Dean leans into the reassuring weight of him, clings to him, and not just because they’re a thousand feet in the air.

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

_Cas pins him against the front door of the chapel and kisses him hard, and he still tastes like strawberry daiquiri, only now it’s layered with god knows what else, and Dean’s pretty sure this is how he’s going to die. He’s also pretty sure that as soon as Cas lets him go, his legs are going to buckle under him; so he sets about making sure Cas doesn’t do that, urging him on with lips and tongue and fumbling through layers of cheap rental suit in search of skin. He’s the most sober he’s been all evening, but now he’s drunk on Cas, ridiculous as that sounds even in his head, so that when Cas growls the single word “hotel” in his ear, it doesn’t even occur to him to argue. He takes his hand out of Cas’s pants and reaches into his own pocket in search of keys, and then he’s being tugged down the steps to the car._

_The fact that they even survive the trip is a miracle, because Dean’s only vaguely sure he’s headed in the right direction and Cas can’t keep his hands to himself. He pulls into the parking lot of the first reputable-looking hotel he sees and makes a half-assed attempt at parking and extricates himself from Cas’s grasp._

_“Newlyweds?” the desk clerk says when he asks for a room, barely bothering to repress a knowing grin at the state of their suits and Cas’s complete disregard for the fact that they’re in public. “You’re in luck—one of our honeymoon suites is available.” Dean starts to say that they don’t need a honeymoon suite and to ask for a less ridiculously-priced room, but Cas’s hands are venturing past PG-13 territory, so he shoves his card across the desk and takes it back along with a tacky gold-glitter keycard._

_They barely make it to the room, and only because they weren’t alone in the elevator. “Cas, Cas, wait a damn minute,” he says at the doorway to their suite, jamming the keycard into the slot for the third time before it finally blinks green. Once they stumble into the room, though, he relents, and Cas practically fucking_ growls _as he manhandles Dean onto the bed. Which is basically every fantasy Dean’s definitely never had cranked up to eleven, so it’s almost as much a surprise to him as it is to Cas when he says, “Hey, Cas, slow down, all right?”_

_Cas looks up from where he’s been intently sucking a bruise over Dean’s clavicle, his cheeks flushed and his pupils dilated, hair wrecked from having Dean’s fingers tangled in it. He’s still rutting against Dean, through both their dress slacks, and Dean hasn’t come in his pants in a long time, but that streak is in real danger of being over. Somewhat reluctantly, he slips a hand down to Cas’s hip and urges him still. “Slow down,” he repeats._

_“Dean,” Cas says, and the longing in his voice is so apparent that he doesn’t need to say anything else. But he does slow down; he abandons the hickey he’d been working on and moves up to Dean’s mouth, kisses him slow and sweet, the barest pressure on his lips. Dean makes an approving noise, and Cas takes that as a cue to let his hands wander down again. He unbuckles Dean’s belt, unbuttons his slacks, and Dean doesn’t interrupt him this time, instead reaching down between them to return the favor. Once the rest of their clothing is kicked away, Cas lowers himself onto Dean, skin to skin, and Dean gasps so sharply it breaks the kiss._

_“Fuck, Cas,” Dean murmurs, as Cas nuzzles at the spot between his ear and the edge of his jaw; Cas grunts softly in agreement, fingertips skating along Dean’s skin agonizingly near his cock. He’s never, ever wanted anything in his life more than he wants Cas’s hand on him right now, and so he knows he’s going to hate himself for what he’s about to say, almost as much as he’d hate himself if he didn’t say it. “Okay, hold up. Stop.”_

_Cas sighs into his ear, but complies, and pulls back to look at him._

_“You’re still drunk,” Dean says._

_“I know what I’m doing, Dean,” Cas replies. “I know what I want.”_

_“And I’m a hundred percent on board, believe me,” Dean says. “But I’d rather know for sure it’s all you. You know? It’d kill me for you to end up regretting this. So…”_

_Cas drops a last feather-light kiss to his lips and sits up. “I never thought I’d find myself lamenting your morals,” he grumbles._

_“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says, his whole body cursing him at the loss of Cas’s touch. “I’ll show you how moral I am when you sober up.”_

_“That’s a terrible innuendo.”_

_“Shut it,” Dean says. “C’mere.”_

_Cas rolls his eyes, but shifts over until he’s face-to-face with Dean. He’s clearly trying his best to look annoyed, but there’s a soft fondness in his eyes he can’t seem to hide. Dean wonders how long it’s been there, whether he’s just now seeing it for what it is. He reaches instinctively for the ring on his right hand, then stops. What is there to be anxious about, now?_

_He pulls the ring off, finds Cas’s left hand under the covers. “Dean, what—” Cas begins, then stops as Dean slides the ring onto his finger._

_“Don’t freak out or anything,” Dean says. “Just… I don’t want this to be some dumb drunk Vegas thing, okay? Not with you.”_

_“Neither do I.” And Cas pulls off his own ring, slips it onto Dean’s left hand. He brings Dean’s hand to his lips and kisses the knuckles, looking him dead in the eye the whole time._

_It’s a beautiful moment, which is why Dean has to interrupt it with, “You know, I’m pretty sure this makes us Vegas married.”_

_“I’m okay with that,” Cas says, which shuts Dean right up. “Goodnight, Dean.”_

♠︎♥︎♦︎♣︎

Dean’s head is spinning when they finally break apart; he’s relieved Cas doesn’t let go of him immediately, and he sure as hell isn’t planning to let go of Cas anytime soon. Maybe ever. 

“You’re a much better kisser when you’re sober,” Cas says.

“Yeah, well, you’re better to kiss when you don’t taste like strawberry daiquiri,” Dean replies defensively, but he’s smiling, and Cas is smiling, and if that’s not the best thing that’s ever happened, Dean doesn’t know what is. Cas’s thumb gently strokes along his cheekbone, and he can feel the heavy ring resting just above his jaw. He reaches up to touch it, and Cas’s gaze flicks toward the movement.

“Hey…” Dean says, and pulls back just a bit so he can slide the ring off his own finger and take Cas’s hand in his. “I know I fucked this up the first time, but I still think it was a pretty good idea. Whaddya say?”

Cas glances down at the ring poised at the tip of his finger. “If you put it back on, I’m not taking it off again,” he says, and then fixes Dean with an unmistakeable look in his eyes. “Just so we’re absolutely clear.”

“Okay, then,” Dean says, and slides the ring back onto Cas’s finger where it belongs. He pauses a moment to let the image sink in, with all its implications. He feels a little lightheaded, but honestly, it’s mostly because he’s still a hundred stories off the ground. Besides that, he’s never been more sure about where he stands.

Cas traces the ring with a fingertip, and Dean only has a moment to wonder what he’s thinking and whether they’re thinking the same things before Cas slips his own ring off and back onto Dean’s hand. He actually sighs with relief at the weight of it, the warmth from Cas’s skin seeping out of it and into his own. “That’s better,” Cas says, and Dean agrees. This is definitely better.

“So, uh…” Dean says. “How about we take this down to ground level?”

Cas hums in agreement. “You know we’ll have to come back, though,” he says. “Probably for anniversaries.”

Dean groans as he turns toward the doors, but really, the thought doesn’t bother him all that much. And it bothers him even less on the elevator ride down, which he spends pressing Cas up against the wall and trying to find out how hot and bothered he can get him before they reach the ground. He’s not even remotely ashamed when the doors open on a crowd of about twenty tourists and Cas is still trying to smooth down his hair and zip up his pants at the same time. He pulls out his phone as they step out into the sunlight.

“Hey, Sammy,” he says, ignoring the indignant exclamations on the other end of the line. “Which IHOP?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters at once because I love you. ❤ Epilogue is coming (also Sam and Jess!); in the meantime, you can yell at me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/ashesinyourhair) or [Tumblr](http://ashesinyourhair.tumblr.com).
> 
> Wanna reblog this fic on tumblr? [Here's the post.](http://ashesinyourhair.tumblr.com/post/143299174244/waking-up-in-vegas-part-5) Includes a teaser for the first chapter and a link to the latest update. Thanks for spreading the word!


End file.
